Visual Art Group Monograph 2025 by Royal Photographic Society

VISUAL ART MONOGRAPH 2025

ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY THE MAGAZINE OF THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

Lynne Blount

GUEST EDITOR: Martin Addison FRPS (martinaddison22@gmail.com)

DESIGNER: Jacqui Adams (jacqui@demiurgedesign.co.uk)

Visual Art Group Monographs are produced by the Royal Photographic Society Visual Art Group and are provided as part of the annual subscription of the Group. © 2025 All rights reserved on behalf of the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for such permission must be addressed to the Visual Art Group. The Royal Photographic Society and RPS Visual Art Group accept no liability for any misuse or breach of copyright by a contributor. The views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Royal Photographic Society or of the Visual Art Group.

Lynne Blount

Experimental and Expressionist Photographer

A JOURNEY TO AND FROM VEMÖDALEN

As an experimental and expressionist photographer, my goal is to reinterpret the world around me. I use my camera as a paintbrush and strive to capture the essence of my subjects rather than the reality. I aim to create images that resonate with the viewer’s emotions, memories, and life experiences.

Like many other photographers, I’m inspired by nature, and I am especially attracted to the textures shapes and colours found in leaves and trees. Autumn is my favourite season and every year I set about re-imagining the decay and seasonal change.

My journey from representational to expressionist photography has been born mainly from frustration. Having enjoyed street, portrait, and wildlife photography for several years I started to become dissatisfied with what seemed to me to be an emerging ‘sameness’

of images. The tipping point arrived after a trip to the Farne Islands, when I became totally dismayed – to discover everyone had taken the same or similar images to mine. The generally accepted rules about how a photograph should look and the often-repeated requirement for them to be sharp, began to stifle me and so I finally reached vemödalen:

The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist – the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye…

John Koenig

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Everything begins at the beginning, and quite often the beginning begins when you shift your mind in a new direction.

Louie Herron

Trust that little voice in your head that says, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if...’ And then do it.

Duane Michals

After a brief period of feeling lost and without being able to see a new direction, I started to research other methods of making images.

I began to explore Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) and in-camera Multiple Exposures (MEs). My failure rate using both methods was, and still is, extremely high and whilst I was learning from the failures, only having two or three viable images from a shoot of one hundred ICM images began to demoralize me.

An essential aspect of creativity is not to be afraid to fail.

Edwin Land

ICM soon became very popular with other photographers and the obvious technique rather than the imagery itself, began to ‘shout’ from social media posts. Struggling to get the right balance with in-camera multiple exposures I attended a day’s workshop with Doug Chinnery and Valda Bailey. Their guidance and continuing support through the online platform ‘Find Your Voice’ (FYV) have driven me forward in the most unexpected and exciting ways. My focus soon became MEs with the

Red Berries

occasional ICM used as a base image. Attempts to manipulate the complex settings for each image certainly challenged my brain, my patience and my tenacity.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

In 2018 a friend and I began a continuous project at the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire. Our aim

was to re-imagine the sculptures using a combination of ICM and MEs. We worked with the foundation to agree how the images could be used and to ensure we did not fall foul of their strict copyright. As the images I made did not resemble the sculptures in any way, the process was extremely short. As part of our agreement with the Foundation, I must include the following sentence when displaying images derived from the sculptures: ‘These images are displayed here with the kind permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.’

Post-processing required a serious rethink. Having been taught to move the sliders in Lightroom gently and carefully for representational photography, I was now swinging them from left to right with what appeared to be careless abandon. I saved my presets and instead of the prescriptive postprocessing I had been taught, I began to develop my own simple process to help me achieve the growing images in my head.

I always begin post-processing with an in-camera ME as the base image. I use

Lightroom for all my RAW processing and Photoshop for layering and blending. I usually RAW process each ME image in up to 20 different ways, before transferring them to Photoshop individually. I carefully choose which of the RAW processed images I will use as a base image and then gradually add some, if not all, of the other RAW

processed images as layers. I blend the layers individually. This process can take hours, and I often need to abandon the process and begin again. As I am often trying to create the image I have in my head, I sometimes still find it difficult to accept an image that may emerge serendipitously from this process.

Abstract Series: And Away

Don’t shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like.

David Alan Harvey

Abstract Series: Land Grab

Abstract Series: Dancing in the Dark

Abstract Series: Southbank Viewpoint

Abstract Series: The Builder’s Yard

Travel photography can provide a real challenge. Making an ME image I enjoy can take time. It is difficult not to upset the tour guide and other photographers, or get left behind, as I try to find the

best pre-loaded image on my camera to shoot through. Manipulating the various ME settings and experimenting with the White Balance and Blend Modes also adds several minutes. Standing where

other photographers have stood with or without a tripod has never appealed to me and yet on a tour one is directed to such spots. The Trulli Houses and Matera in Puglia Italy can only be photographed

Hidden Windows

from such spots. As my aim is always to create the essence of a place, I often half close my eyes and imagine a painting. I felt I had a responsibility to capture the sad history of Matera rather than just create a pretty picture.

Sometimes it can be the smaller details of a place, when combined with textures

from the area, that give a ‘feeling’ of place.

I often combine other creative methods of making images alongside my ME work. These images were created on a Lightbox using dried leaves.

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.

Henri Matisse

Shadow Play

In the last year I have been exploring mixed media which now often adds a new dimension to my ME/ICM images. I create an image using a Gelli Plate or water colour paper and inks, which I then photograph to use as a base image for in-camera ME work. The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity.

Dan Stevens

Gelli Plate: Waiting for the Wind

Gelli Plate: Orange and Blue with Vase

Gelli Plate: Spring Splash

Gelli Plate: In the Twilight Zone

Gelli Plate: Orwell Estuary

Gelli Plate: Sunset Boatman

Digital collage is hugely time consuming; however, it does provide an opportunity to create different images to everyone else. My imagination can run wild, and I can also make a statement about our world. The Hut and The Glacier were created using all my own images. It is in this genre, that AI can play a small part. Finding a photograph from my catalogue to create a base

The Hut

The Glacier

image for a collage using my own images is not always possible. The base image for Warrior Women and Suspicion were both created from very specific prompts using AI. All the ‘infill’ images were photographed by me using my phone or my camera.

I continue to explore the use of a variety of creative approaches with the aim of expanding my artistic repertoire. Leaving one’s ‘comfort zone’ is always a challenge but, without doing so, we can’t grow and develop as artists. I rarely make a representational image, unless I know I will use it as a base image for ME or digital collage.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun.

Mary Lou Cook

Suspicion

Warrior Women

The joy of working with in-camera ME’s, surpasses all the frustrations encountered both in the field and with postprocessing. I enjoy the fact that each of my images is completely unique and can’t be copied. I have grown used to not having definitive settings and enjoy

the process of experimenting with incamera blend modes, white balance and the ever-helpful exposure compensation. A successful outcome depends so much on the settings chosen, the order in which they are used, the quality of light, the contrast, and the colour of

the subject being photographed. I am always mindful that I can never return to a subject and re-create a previous image or improve upon one. Having focused on this unusual way of making images for more than seven years, I can’t now imagine working any other way.

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding make even more art.

Andy Warhol

https://rps.org/groups/visual-art/